I'm in need of work; I'm down to less than half-time consulting schedule at this point, and have basically been looking for full-time work. Anyway, looking for:

• Embedded programming (C/assembly for whatever random architecture is cool lately)
• Low-level/network server programming
• Nearly any operations gig

Resume here.

Mostly been interviewing on the operations side 'cause that's where my recent experience is, but I'm finding my skills are an odd match for most ops jobs (ie running java websites)

kthx!

    
    
    
    

Flickr set

Current Mood: busy

The last few months I've been joking that I'm confident staying with E*trade as my primary bank+brokerage because they're so experienced at teetering on the edge of collapse. They've been doing it for years! Lately their insistence of their non-failure has been taken up a notch though. Every other month is an email dedicated to discussing their solvency, and pretty much every email about anything else includes something like this:

Please be assured that this decision has nothing at all to do with the financial health of E*TRADE FINANCIAL, which has been, and continues to be, very well capitalized by every applicable regulatory standard.

They pretty much have to justify and/or apologize for their every action now, but I suppose most banks are doing that these days.

(This particular email was about how they're closing down their proprietary index funds, which had barely any humans involved and therefore have exceptionally low loads. Of course I own a decent amount of them, so this is kinda annoying...)

Ok so the technical quality is uh not up to my usual elitist standards, but this is seriously my favourite video posted to flickr to date. (from xaosenkosmos like a month ago but I've watched it enough times that it seems worth sharing!)

Anyway, I don't make real posts anymore. How are you, internets?

I'm not much one for year-in-review posts (in fact I don't think I've ever done one!), but I had a good time trolling my flickr stream for 2008 anyway. It was really hard to just pick one thing/photo a month. (Also interesting to see my photo style evolve. A year is enough to actually see changes!)

January I spent a weekend in Los Angeles, planespotting and hanging out with nibot and breelupia. We went on a hike in the mountains and spent a moon-lit evening lounging around in a lovely natural hot spring. I got hit on by a naked redneck, we hiked back to the car in complete darkness, and we took a long drive in the mountains to take some stoned kid home. Good times.
February I went to Tokyo for the first time, to finish setting up a datacenter. It was pretty awesome.
March tony_m and I had spent the last half of 2007 trying to figure out where to go on a big hiking trip. Eventually we decided on the Grand Canyon, Tony planned the hike and got the permits, and somehow we wrangled terraplanner and Albert into joining us. Four days in the Grand Canyon. It was, predictably, amazing.
April Took a pleasant flight down to San Louis with Paul. By all accounts, I also turned 26.
May We threw terraplanner a big weekend-long 30th birthday party at a rental in Half Moon Bay. Turned out to be a great party!
June Took a trip up to BC to visit j0ni and Rachel and the kids for a week in Nanaimo. Nice, relaxing trip. (That month I also met (via flickr!) my neighbors Brian and Kelly, who have since turned out to be very good friends.)
July Visited my family in Phoenix for a weekend, and enjoyed monsoon season (the most interesting weather Arizona has to offer).
August Took a long weekend in San Diego for cpratt and danlmarmot's wedding. Very fun, and got to spend a day with valdelane too. All people I don't see nearly often enough.
September Went to Paris for the first time! Also a few days planespotting in Frankfurt and Munich.
October Another trip to Tokyo! This one was even better than the last. Explored a lot more, and went for a fantastic hike in the mountains.
November Met someone special. We had some great times.
December Took a long weekend in DC, one of my favourite cities. It was all wintery cold and decorated for Christmas and the Obamathon. I look forward to going back again very soon, as soon as the mess is over.